London Calling: Whose GPU in Exynos Octa?

Imagination and ARM share prices sent bouncing by Samsung silence over who has the GPU design win inside the Exynos 5 Octa big-little applications processor.

The share prices of rival U.K. processor intellectual property licensors Imagination Technologies Group plc and ARM Holdings plc have been bouncing up and down on the London Stock Exchange over the last couple of days. And this would appear to be all because of uncertainty over who has provided the graphics processing unit for the Exynos 5 Octa application processor from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

Stephen Woo, systems LSI president of Samsung, disclosed the availability of the eight-cored, "big-little" processor during a keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show being held in Las Vegas last week, but he and a press release put out by Samsung provided very little detail.

As such it was left to reporters – myself included – to point out that Samsung was working closely with ARM, being the first company to announce a big-little processor based on Cortex-A series cores from ARM, and that previous versions of Exynos processors had used Mali graphics processors, also from ARM. If this continued, reporters, said it was reasonable to expect a Mali T604 would perform graphics duties inside the Exynos 5 Octa application processor.

I did ask Samsung for more information on the Exynos 5 Octa processor when the story broke. Something like a datasheet would have been perfect, but they have been unable to provide anything so far, or put up anyone to answer a few technical questions.

However, such lack of open-ness does have consequences. These consequences are not so much for Korean giant Samsung as for its suppliers ARM and Imagination.

It turns out stockbrokers were by and large expecting Imagination to have beaten ARM's Mali to the Exynos 5 Octa design slot and so on Monday Jan. 14, after the anecdotal discussion of Mali, Imagination's share price started to tumble on the London Stock Exchange. It fell from a high of nearly 480 pence on the Friday (Jan. 11) to a low of 420 pence on Monday (Jan. 14) just before the close. Meanwhile ARM stock enjoyed a buoyant Monday at close to record highs and closed at 873 pence.

Overnight a report has emerged in which the author states he is "fairly confident" that the GPU inside the Exynos 5 Octa processor is the PowerVR SGX 544MP3 running at a clock frequency of up to 533-MHz licensed from Imagination. That seems to have been enough for the stockbrokers this Tuesday morning (Jan. 15) who immediately knocked 4 percent of ARM's share price and had the stock trading at just below 840 pence. At the same Imagination shares climbed back up to recover most of the ground lost on Monday.

The irony is that both ARM and Imagination know very well what the situation is, but must sit and watch while their share prices bungee up and down. For it is the customers' prerogative to choose when and how to disclose details of their products.

ZomZom, whats with the stupid link to insurance sales ?
The rumoured powerVr core, although not having the same theoritical Gflops performance for compute applications, will have a better fill rate and similar graphical performance otherwise, as the ipad4.
If the rumour is true, then it would appear that Arm did not have a graphics solution available that could compete with this. Even their much shouted about T604 is only getting approx 2/3 graphics performance of the ipad4 chip.
http://www.glbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=glpro25&showhide=true&data-source=1&D1=Google%20Nexus%2010&D2=Apple%20iPad%204

Not always. Their remarks about Haswell being suited for tablets have been way off the mark, and they didn't even realize those 10W would be FAR weaker chips than what we have in ultrabooks today. I'm thinking sub-1 Ghz chips here - that still cost like $200+, which is as much as the entire BOM for the iPad.